For the Napoleon in you*

When it comes to time tracking, some of us are lucky enough to work on 2-10 tasks a day. In cases like that, the Paymo Desktop Widget is a perfect fit, you just change the task and click the start button.
What happens if you have to switch between tasks every couple of minutes? Time tracking in this case becomes a pain and however conscious you may be, you will stop tracking time.
If you find yourself in this situation we think we can help out!

For this purpose we’ve designed PaymoPlus:

PaymoPlus - Time Tracker

This is a typical usage scenario for the app:

After you start PaymoPlus, it will record the title of all windows that are in foreground. At the end of the day you will have a list of all the windows you opened during the day, grouped by application (or grouped by hour – section #2) in the section #3.
To tell PaymoPlus that the ammount of time you spent in Firefox is related to “Paymo > Development > Import/Backup” you just drag “Firefox” from section #3 over the task (Import/Backup) in section #2. Of course you can be more detailed and “expand” the Firefox node and drag over only the specific entries that relate to a particular task.
Once you do that, the entries that were show in section #2 will be uploaded to the Paymo server (backend) as entries and they will move to section #4 (Entries linked with Paymo)

While testing PaymoPlus in our daily routine we noticed that you go through a lot of unique window titles (which is the basic unit when tracking time this way) during a day, some times more then a hundred. It would be very difficult to link each window with a particular task. To solve this we added the “Filter” box in section #2.

Suppose you worked today on the Import/Backup feature for Paymo and you want to filter out the entries that were related to that activity in Notepad++. You would enter “notepad paymo import”, click “Apply” and the #3 section will show only the window titles that contain all those words. In most of the cases all i have to do is “select all” items from section #3 and drag them over to section #1
Most of the time this procedure will help you make the links between items in section #3 and tasks in section #1 for over 90% of your time in just a few minutes.

When using PaymoPlus, all you have to do to track your time is spend 5 minutes at the end of the day and match window titles to your project/task structure.
Even when you forget to do that, you can always come back to it later the next day (or week) and you’ll still be able to do it. To remind you that you missed some steps, the calendar in section #2 will underline the dates that have items in section #3 that are not linked to tasks.

• If you want to add a description to a particular entry, hold Ctrl while dragging the items, this will display a popup that will let you enter the description.
• You can also link entries by right clicking on an entry and select Link Time With Task
• To add a tasklist or task, you right click it’s parent element and select “Add Tasklist” or “Add Task”
• You can add specific Applications (like Winamp) to the ignore list, right click and select “Exclude Application”
• If the Project/Task structure has changed on the server, you can click View > Refresh Projects

We hope you find this application useful and we’d love to get your feedback!

You can Download PaymoPlus here: http://www.paymo.biz/paymoplus/

Update: To better understand how PaymoPlus posts time to Paymo please read this thread.

* Napoleon was believed  to be brilliant at multi-tasking.  While emperor, he would often arrange a dozen secretaries around him and dictate a dozen letters simultaneously.

Here’s a list of new features that were added:

• you can now edit a time entry directly from the Reports page
• administrators are now able to edit time entries of  their employees from their account
• ID selectors were added to the invoice html to help with CSS customization
• now you can sync your Paymo milestones with Basecamp
• employees can now edit only their own tasks
• emails sent from Paymo can now be setup to come from your company email account (advanced feature)
• different formats for currencies
• you are now able to sync your Paymo invoices with Xero

We’re excited to let you know about some new features we’ve released in the past few weeks.

We’ll start with one of the most requested features from our user community, the ability to create recurring invoices. We’ve tried to make this process straight forward and as easy as possible.

When you need to create a recurring invoice you should go to the Recurring section under Invoices and click on the Add Recurring Profile or simply add a new invoice in the system and click on the “Recurring” checkbox on the top of the invoice.
Having done this will allow you to set the following parameters:

• Start Date – the start date of your recurring profile
• Frequency – you can set the frequency to weekly, every 2 or 4 weeks, monthly, every 2 – 3 – 6 months or yearly
• Occurrences – the number of occurrences for the recurring profile. (you can leave it empty if you want them to be created forever)
• Send Automatically – you have to option to send the invoice automatically to your clients email address set up in Paymo

If you receive recurring payments this feature will make your life a lot easier and you’ll only have to worry about getting paid!

The other features we’ve recently introduced deal with collaboration and managing projects. We’ve added functionality that allows you to comment on any task in the system, you can now share your thoughts and project information with your team mates easily.
Managing tasks is now easier using the new “due date” and “assigned to” filters that will help you find and prioritize tasks. Tied to this we’ve added color coding that will highlight tasks based on their due date.

We hope you’ll enjoy the new features and we welcome your feedback on the blog, via mail or our customer support portal.

Paymo.biz Time Tracker is third-party Firefox add-on plugin that helps with tracking your time using the Paymo API. This plugin can be considered as a lightweight alternative to the official desktop widget, at least to web developers which spend most of their time using Mozilla Firefox as their main development browser.

Before using this plugin, you’ll need to set your API key, username and password in plugin’s Options. The API key can be found easily in your Paymo account on the Company Settings page. This plugin adds a small statusbar icon to your browser. You can track your time using the popup menus which can be accessed by left/right clicking on it.

While the current version doesn’t give you the possibility to add or edit the projects and tasks, future versions might include these as well.

Here are some screenshots of the plugin in action:

You can download and install this plugin from the Mozilla Add-ons page. Also, you can check out the source, fork it on Github and make your own changes to it. Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

About the author:

This plugin was created and released as open-source by Valentin Agachi, an experienced web developer. For the past years, Valentin has worked on both front-end and back-end development over at CodingHeads, providing services like layout conversion to XHTML/HTML5/CSS code and custom WordPress themes development.

The Paymo system has scheduled maintenance on Saturday morning, August 14, 2010, for the servers that run the Paymo backend.

This maintenance window is scheduled to begin at 11 a.m CET (Europe) or 5 a.m EDT (US). This work will require a system reboot which will cause a downtime of 15 to 30 minutes during which your Paymo account will not function.

Anyone using the Paymo widget will be able to track time, the entries will be saved locally and they will be synced online once the system is up and running.

If you have any questions please contact us!